This Used To Count As Home Teaching

I do not know what my last words will be, but there’s a strong chance they’ll be sputtered out on a sticky fast food floor underneath the crescent moon-shaped remnants of a quadruple cheeseburger.   Should that be the case I ask only that my food card get stamped. Please get it stamped. It’s for my children and my children’s children. A minor step towards a free sandwich is my only real legacy. In related but less-sandwichy news – have you ever heard of James Washington? He had some accidental last words. He thought the walls were closing in. The light he perceived at the end of the tunnel was orange and flickering. He had a heart attack, you see. He was an inmate serving time for attempted second degree murder, but he’d been hiding something worse. As is probably common when someone has been hiding something enormously horrible for years and they think their time was up – he wanted to confess his horrible secret: “Washington, who was already in prison serving a 15-y...

Remove the fear of sudden, horrible, flattening death and you may have more people zipping around the world in those wing suit thingies. Take away untimely entry to the great beyond and you’d probably have more dangerous sports like shark-wrestling and - I don’t know - maybe spelunking. Blue whale intestinal spelunking. That, of course, would be just like watching a humongous colonoscopy but with sports drink commercials, blow holes and a daring adventurer who can really hold his breath. But there is a fear of death. Lazarus being brought back from oblivion resonates for a reason. “ Lazarus, come forth,” said Christ in John 11:43, and Lazarus did just that.   In a gross over simplification, the once-dead man stepped out of the tomb like Boris Karloff on a film set in 1932. The ultimate miracle in the Bible was Christ’s own resurrection, but the raising of Lazarus is one of the next few to come to mind. Peter raised the dead too. Acts 9...